


Journey to the Center of the Moon

by m_class



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: (based not on the Jules Verne novel, (dinosaurs do), (disclaimer: Brendan Fraser does not appear in this fic), Action/Adventure, Boats and Ships, Danger, Dinosaurs, Friendship, Gen, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Journey to the Center of the Earth AU, Magma, Minor Injuries, Piranhas, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Ridiculous Science, away mission, but on the 2008 movie based on the Jules Verne novel feat. Brendan Fraser and dinosaurs)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-25
Updated: 2018-07-25
Packaged: 2019-06-15 23:04:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15423603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/m_class/pseuds/m_class
Summary: An away mission gone wrong lands Janeway, Chakotay, Tom and Harry in a vast cavern at the heart of an alien moon. With only forty-eight hours before magma heats the chamber to deadly temperatures, the away team will have to muster all their daring and ingenuity as they confront the obstacles to their escape--along with some surprising truths about each other.





	1. In Which Our Heroes Make a Discovery (Not Quite Intentionally)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SerenLyall](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SerenLyall/gifts).



> As mentioned in the tags, this is an AU of Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008)! It hews pretty close to the plot of the movie (with the important note that none of the four members of the away team in this fic are meant to correspond to the three characters in the original...not even Tom is as immature as an (admittedly pretty with-it) literal twelve-year-old). It's not quite a blow-by-blow, though, and I did throw in a surprise or two, so hopefully it will be enough to keep anyone who has seen the movie guessing. ;)
> 
> All dragging of the movie's fake science is done with love; all fake science I added myself is no less fake. :)
> 
> This is my thank you gift for SerenLyall...thanks so much for the study help & editing. Having your support, academic and otherwise, meant a lot to me as I wrapped up my semester ♥

“This is it!”

Kathryn Janeway leans forward in her command chair, amused and more than a little surprised by her helmsman's outburst. “This is what, Tom?”

“It's the moon from the book, I'm sure of it; it's no wonder we were getting those readings, Captain, when the volcanic activity is visibly--”

“Slow down, Tom,” Kathryn says, raising a hand. “ _What_ book?”

“The book I've been telling you all about.” Tom sounds slightly aggrieved. “The book I got from that trader at the Riavn station, about the explorers who travel to the center of a moon and find extinct megafauna from their home planet--”

"Tom,” Chakotay says from the command chair at Kathryn’s side, a hint of a laugh in his voice, “isn't that book...fictional?”

“Well, that’s what they _say_ ,” says Tom, looking shifty, “but the description of the moon in the book matches the readings Harry just gave us exactly!”

“Not _exactly_ ,” Harry puts in helpfully. “Several of the energy readings are significantly lower than--”

“Oh, potato potahto, Harry. It’s too close to be a coincidence. Now, how would a culture living several lightyears away be able to make up an entirely fictional account of a moon with a life-supporting bubble at its core that _just so happens_ to match this actual moon we--”

“Fascinating though this discussion may be, gentlemen,” Kathryn drawls, “why don’t we table it for now and focus on our dilithium readings. Harry?”

***

As Chakotay reaches the corridor outside the transporter room, he spots Tom and B’Elanna sharing an extremely intimate farewell twenty meters ahead of him. Tactfully averting his gaze, he tries to slow his steps enough that B’Elanna will have departed by the time he reaches Tom.

Staring scrupulously into the carpeting as he walks, he tries to stifle the mild flicker of protective ire that still flares in his chest whenever he is reminded of Tom and B’Elanna’s purported bond. Oh, Tom is a good officer, he’ll allow that; a good friend to crewmembers from Harry to Kathryn, and he’s saved the ship many times over.

It isn’t that Chakotay dislikes Tom, or thinks he has poor intentions toward B’Elanna.

_It’s just that Tom...well, Tom…_

It isn’t that he _dislikes_ Tom, Chakotay insists silently to himself. And it isn’t that he has some sexist feeling of protectiveness over B’Elanna just because she’s female, either, he insists even more firmly. It’s just that B’Elanna is younger than Chakotay, and he’s been her captain on two ships, and what with one thing and another, she’s practically family. Who wouldn’t feel a latent sense of protectiveness and caution, watching someone who’s practically a younger sibling fall in love with a man who...who…

 _He’s just...not_ together _enough for her. Not settled in who he wants to be, or how he deals with the universe and all its chaos. Their relationship is getting serious--lifelong-commitment level serious--and he’s not...he’s not_ ready _for that kind of relationship with B’Elanna. She deserves more than that._

Sighing, Chakotay pushes the thought from his mind. Tom and B’Elanna are happy together. They have--for the most part--been good for each other. That’s what counts.

“All set, Tom?” he asks cheerfully.

“Ready and waiting, Commander,” Tom says with a cheeky grin, and Chakotay can’t help but smile back--a genuine smile. Despite his ruminations, Chakotay does enjoy Tom’s company--at least in small doses--and he certainly admires the progress he’s made as an officer. No one could deny how much the man has grown, these last six years on Voyager.

Kathryn steps into view from the other end of the corridor, Naomi, Azan, Rebi and Mezoti trailing behind her like a gaggle of baby geese. Chakotay ducks his head to hide his grin.

“--talk to Seven about how dilithium is used to power Voyager, if you’re interested. It’s wonderful to have such keen scientific minds as part of our crew.”

“Will you send us a holo of you on the moon? You should make _this_ face.” Mezoti sticks her tongue out, crosses her eyes, and raises her hands to give herself antlers.

“ _No_ , she should make _this_ face.” Rebi bares his teeth in an exaggerated grimace, wrinkling up his nose. Azan nods solemnly in confirmation.

“I see you’ve been getting some last-minute mission briefings, Captain,” says Chakotay, barely hiding his smile.

“I have indeed, Commander.” Janeway turns back to her flock. “All right, go meet Seven for kadis kot. You’ll get to hear about the dilithium mining survey when it’s done.”

“Good luck, Captain!” says Naomi cheerfully.

“Good luck!” echoes Mezoti. “Byyyyyye, Haaaaarry!”

Chakotay glances behind him to see Harry, approaching from the direction Chakotay came, as the younger squadron runs off in the opposite direction towards the turbolift.

“Bye, Mezoti! Bye, Azan! Bye, Rebi! Bye, Naomi!” Harry calls brightly before turning to face the other adults. “So, what’d I miss?”

***

As the four members of the survey team stand on the transporter pad, backs straight and phasers and tricorders at their belts, Harry has a strange moment of deja vu. The scene is such a classic Starfleet moment that they could easily be back in their first year in the Delta Quadrant, but for Janeway’s shorter hair and the beginnings of laugh lines around Chakotay’s eyes.

And Tom’s just-faintly-receding hairline. Harry bites his cheek to hide a grin. _That too._

Janeway nods smartly at the transporter room operator. “Ready to beam down, crewman.”

The planet that materializes around them is bare and rocky, the mountainous landscape bathed in grey-blue light as stormclouds gather overhead.

“All right,” Janeway says, her voice loud and round with the tones of command. “The weather is cooperating for now, but we don’t want to be here when that storm hits. The Planetary Meteorology department gave us thirty minutes for the survey, and we’re going to abide by their calculations. That should give us plenty of time to complete the preliminary dilithium scans for Voyager’s mining operation. While we’re down here, no one goes off alone. Commander, Ensign, head northwest and meet back here by 15:10. Tom, you’re with me.”

After the other members of the away team have acknowledged the orders, Harry turns and follows Chakotay, beginning to hike in the opposite direction to Tom and Janeway. Between the low barometric pressure, the gathering stormclouds, and the on-mission seriousness with which Janeway outlined their orders, the air feels solemn and full of purpose; this isn’t the kind of away mission that has room for chitchat or joking around.

Chakotay and Harry walk in intent yet companionable silence for a while, their tricorders humming and beeping as they take in data. It has only been twenty minutes when there is a clap of thunder in the sky and the clouds open up on them.

“All right, let’s head back to the meeting point!” Chakotay orders over the sound of the storm. Each of them slips multiple times as they hike quickly back over the rain-slick rocks, squinting into the sheets of rain ahead of them. Harry can hear Chakotay gently cursing Voyager’s meteorology team as he gives Harry a hand up from his latest fall, his hand warm and solid as he pulls the younger officer to his feet. With a word of thanks, Harry walks onward, pulling ahead of Chakotay as they get within visual range of the empty meeting point.

In the minute it takes to cover the rest of the distance to the meeting coordinates, the other half of the away team fails to materialize. Chakotay holds out his tricorder, scanning, while Harry turns in a slow circle, trying to spot red-uniformed shoulders through the rain.

“I don’t see them, Commander.”

The tricorder begins to beep, and Chakotay points in the direction in which its sensor has flagged lifesigns. Harry walks beside him, squinting into the distance ahead of them, and gives a shout when he finally sees Janeway and Tom, stationary near the mouth of a cave.

As Harry and Chakotay approach, the reason for the delay becomes clear. Tom’s left leg is caught under a large rock which must have shifted, pinning him in place. He does not seem to be injured or in significant pain, much to Harry’s relief; only stuck. Janeway is kneeling in the muddy gravel next to him, the two of them straining together to shift the sofa-sized boulder.

“Captain!” Reaching the other half of the team, Chakotay and Harry shoves their weight against the rock alongside Janeway. Moments later, Tom is scuttling his way out.

“The rocks are shifting!” Janeway yells over the noise of the storm and a growing rumbling sound from higher up the mountain. “We need to find shelter!”

“We need to get to the meeting point!” Chakotay yells back, gesturing behind him. “With all the ion radiation in the atmosphere, that’s the only place Voyager knows to get us out--”

“There’s no time!” The rumbling is louder now, and, wiping rainwater from his face, Harry peers up to see grey and black rocks shifting and tumbling downward.

Pulling Tom to his feet, Janeway points to a dark opening. “In there! Now!”

“If the rocks block the mouth we’ll be trapped--”

“And if that rockslide hits us we’ll be killed! Into the cave, Chakotay!” Kathryn grabs his hand, yanking him towards the mouth of the cave. “That’s an order—!”

He follows her in, and they Harry and Tom jog after them.

“Move back,” Janeway orders. “Let’s put some distance between us and any and all big flying rocks, hmm?”

Shining light into the recesses of the cave, the group slowly make their way away from the entrance. Harry takes a deep breath, trying not to think about the sound of the rockslide growing louder.

Huddled together ten meters from the mouth of the cave, the four officers can only watch as the rockslide reaches the opening, tumbling logs and boulders the size of Voyager’s shuttles coming to rest in front of the cave as their brethren continue to roar down the sides of the rocky mountains around them, leaving the cave in darkness.

***

Blinking, Tom switches on his wrist beacon, illuminating the craggy walls of the cave and the solemn faces of his companions.

“Everyone all right?”

There is a chorus of yeses, and Chakotay asks, “Are _you_ all right, Tom?”

“I’m fine. No more than a little sore.”

There is a moment of silence. Janeway breaks it, announcing in round command tones, “Once the storm clears, Tuvok will send another shuttle down. They’ll see our lifesigns, and will probably be able to comm us if they’re close enough. Then they’ll be able to get the equipment they need from Voyager to get us out of here. We’re in no immediate danger; we just need to wait for their arrival.”

“All right,” Chakotay says, giving the rocks strewn around the bottom of the cave an experimental kick. “Let’s clear a place to rest while we wait.”

“Aye sir,” Tom says cheekily, earning himself an eyeroll from Harry. Crouching down, he helps Chakotay sweep away rocks and gravel, and is just lowering himself to sit on the cavern floor when Janeway says, “That’s strange.”

“What is it?” Chakotay asks, looking up at her.

She is standing facing away from the blocked entrance, looking into the darker recesses of the cave, tricorder held out in front of her. “I’m getting dilithium readings. Strong ones. But...not like any I’ve seen before.”

Harry gets to his feet, scrambling over to her. “Wow,” he says softly.

With a groan, Tom pushes himself up, joining the two of them, with Chakotay on his heels. Rubbing his eyes, he peers at the glowing tricorder screen and instantly understands what Janeway and Harry are marveling about. “These are the kind of readings we’d get if the dilithium was purified and sitting around on Voyager, not buried in this planet’s crust.”

Janeway switches on her wrist beam, which extends about five meters into the darkness of the back of the cave before the light dissolves into the blackness. “Up for a little exploring, gentlemen?”

“Always,” says Harry with a grin.

Punching Harry on the shoulder, Tom adds, “Rockslides? Spooky caves? Brave explorers? This is just like an exploration holonovel!”

Harry groans.

“Lead on, ma’am!” Tom finishes, earning a snort from Janeway as she leads the team forward into the dark unknown.

Chakotay brings up the rear, and as they set off into the cave, Tom can hear Voyager’s second in command sigh.

The cavern floor becomes gradually more sloped as the away team walks on through the darkness, until it feels like they are hiking downward rather than on a level. The team’s wrist beacons illuminate craggy walls and dripping water, and the beeping of Janeway’s tricorder grows louder.

“This is just like that book you got off the travelling salesman, Tom,” Harry says in a stage whisper.

“He was a _trader_ , not a ‘travelling salesman,’” Tom whispers back. “And I’m sorry to report that unless we end up in a magma pocket full of ferocious megafauna in the center of this moon, this exciting little away mission is still a _little_ lackluster in comparison.”

“Oh, so _you’ve_ read the book,” Chakotay grumbles in Harry’s general direction. “Who else has read the book.”

There is a moment of silence, then Janeway says, with a smile in her voice, “It _is_ a cracking good read, Commander.”

“Yeah, _Commander_ , it is,” Tom says pointedly.

“All right. Fine. I borrowed it from B’Elanna when she was reading it, and I’m sure she told you that. _Ensign_.”

Tom is opening his mouth to retort--the banter is, more or less, good-natured, but he can’t help but feel a spurt of anger at Chakotay’s reciprocal use of Tom’s demoted title, fair or otherwise--when Janeway stops walking.

“It looks like we’ve found our dilithium.”

Tom stares.

The cave dead-ends ahead of them in a gentle, arcing wall. Studded across the surface of that wall, glimmering in the light of the wrist beacons, is...

Harry shakes his head in disbelief. “Dilithium doesn’t just sit on cave walls waiting to be yanked out and dropped in a backpack like gemstones in a children’s holonovel.”

“Well, apparently on this moon it does.” Tom holds out his hand for the backpack Harry is carrying. Striding across the cavern to the dilithium-loaded wall, he pops a crystal from the surrounding rock with one hand and drops it into the pack, where it lands with a satisfying _thunk_. Grabbing a few more, he stuffs them into the pack, turning back to the group with a grin. “With this amount of dilithium, we can fill this up and not even need to do any more mining after Voyager finds us! Maybe we’ll even--”

“Tom, _freeze!”_

The entire group freezes in place, turning to look at Janeway, who is staring at the dark rock beneath Tom’s feet.

“That’s muscovite,” she continues. Her voice is low and deadly serious. “It’s very, _very_ fragile. And according to the tricorder, there’s a whole lot of nothing under it.”

Wide-eyed, Tom stares down. “All right. Should I walk back…?”

Janeway nods. “Carefully. Distribute your weight between your feet as much as you can.”

Slowly, Tom begins to make his way back towards the edge of the muscovite.

“Halfway there, Tom,” Harry says encouragingly, his voice tense. Tom shoots him a quick grin.

Janeway and Chakotay are watching him, eyes grim and utterly focused, as he traverses the final steps off the muscovite.

As he reaches the group, Janeway lets out a relieved _ha!_ of breath, smiling warmly at him. Harry slaps him gently on the shoulder.

“Well, now that that’s over with,” he says, wiping his forehead, “we should probably all get back to the safety of the upper cave--”

One of the dilithium crystals slips out of the top of Tom’s backpack, plummeting to the muscovite surface behind him.

Tom can see with liquid-slow clarity the expression on his friends’ faces as they gasp, flinch, and widen their eyes in horror.

The crystal hits the ground with an anticlimactic _crunch_ , digging only slightly into the surface of the rock and sitting there.

The entire group exhales.

Janeway smiles in relief. “It must be thicker than I thought--”

Her words are cut off by the group’s screams and the roar of shattering rock as the muscovite gives way and the floor of the cavern cracks apart beneath them, sending them free-falling through the dark.


	2. In Which Our Heroes Continue Their Adventure (Not Necessarily Happily)

“Harry!”

Harry opens his eyes blearily. Janeway is kneeling next to him, gently shaking his shoulder. As he looks back at her, he sees her relax infinitesimally, smiling down at him before reaching for the tricorder at her belt.

Scanning him, she informs him, “You have a mild concussion and a few bruises, but other than that you seem to be _undamaged_ , as our friend Seven would say.”

“How did I survive that fall?” he asks, staring at her. Behind Janeway, he can see Chakotay and Tom scanning their dim orange surroundings with tricorders. “How did _any_ of us survive that fall?”

“The chute we were falling through narrowed,” Janeway says, giving him a hand up. “After a long drop, it slowly became slanted rather than vertical, so that we ended up sliding horizontally until it was so level that we came to a gradual stop rather than a fatal one. And just when we had almost slowed down enough to scramble to a halt, the chute spat us out onto the ground...in here.”

Harry stares at the landscape around them.

They are on the floor of what can only be the most immense natural subterranean space Harry has ever seen, so large that its ceiling is hidden in an orange haze, like a cloudy underground sky. All around them are mushrooms taller than an adult human, growing out of the spongy soil beneath them and reaching for the sunset-colored heavens.

“The cavern from the book is real,” he whispers.

“It sure is,” Tom says, turning and waggling a small rectangle at him. “And aren’t you all glad I brought the book along?”

Janeway rolls her eyes. “We’re delighted, Tom. Keep scanning, would you? We need to find food and water and, more importantly, a way out.”

Chakotay’s tricorder beeps softly. “Well, I don’t know about a way out,” he says, “but if we’re looking for water, we want to head that way.”

As they make their way through the forest of mushrooms, Harry wipes droplets of sweat from his forehead, smiling to himself at the obvious excitement on Janeway and Tom’s faces. A magma pocket at the center of an alien moon? This is all of Tom’s favorite adventure holonovels, and all of Voyager’s greatest feats of exploration, all rolled into one.

Harry, too, is gratified to be here, seeing something no humans have encountered before. But he has to admit that the out-of-the-ordinary nature of this away mission makes him hopeful for another reason, as well.

Over the last few years, he hasn’t frequently been on away missions with the captain. Each time he is, he can’t help the faint hope that maybe, maybe, if he impresses her enough, it might push her over the edge towards considering finally giving him his somewhat overdue promotion.

He and Janeway have talked about his rank, seriously and intently, in her ready room on Voyager. He knows that her reasons for keeping him an ensign are based on the logic of the ship’s organization--whether he agrees with that logic or not--and that it isn’t because of a lack of proving himself, or anything about himself at all, that he still holds his current rank. Yet nonetheless, he can’t help the surge of hope, whenever he ends up working beside Janeway during a shipwide crisis or a dramatic away-mission-gone-wrong such as this one, that _this_ time, she’ll finally see just how far he’s come from the anxious Academy graduate in her ready room all those years ago. This time, she’ll finally come to see him as so superfluously capable that his time as an ensign will be a thing of the past, minutiae of ship’s organization be damned.

***

Walking just behind Janeway and Harry, Tom stares around at the giant flora surrounding them, rubbing his fingers absently against the book’s leather cover. “It’s all real,” he said quietly. “Do you know what this means? What’s recorded in the book is real.”

Chakotay glances darkly at their surroundings, then adds in a low voice, “Including the incredibly dangerous parts?”

Tom bits his lip, looking at Chakotay and the other members of the away team, who have turned back to listen, their human faces small and alone in the towering dimness of the cavern. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

Enormous seeds drift through the air like the tops of giant dandelions as the four of them make their way through the mushroom forest. Tom shakes his head, wondering, despite himself, how he might recreate this environment on the holodeck once they make their way back to Voyager.

Because they _are_ going to get back to Voyager.

_We have to._

“Look.”

Harry follows the direction of Chakotay’s pointing finger. Ahead of them is what looks like a hollowed-out tree, a few sticks bundled together at its base.

“Well, someone was here before us,” Tom mutters, waving the book. “We can be sure of that now.”

Janeway is the first to clamber into the chamber against Chakotay’s defeated protest, sticking her head back out and gesturing for them to climb after her. She is grinning broadly. “Wait until you see this!”

Tom drops lightly down into the hollowed-out room after Chakotay and Harry. “Whoa.”

Janeway waves a sheaf of papers under his nose. “More notes. Same handwriting as your book. Someone did visit this place before us--and escaped to tell their tale.”

“Hey, Tom?” says Harry, smirking affectionately. “I apologize for calling your book a ‘piece of junk for gullible tourists.’”

Chakotay hefts an abandoned rock pick covered with dust as Janeway sinks down onto the edge of a frayed hammock, scanning the notes. “According to our anonymous friend, we’re in a pocket surrounded by the magma that forms this moon’s core. Apparently, the temperature here fluctuates, and when volcanic activity is high--as Voyager’s sensors said it was now--the temperature in this pocket can reach nearly a hundred centigrade.”

Tom’s eyes widen. “Which we could never survive.”

Janeway shakes her head. “No. We need to get out before it hits seventy centigrade. Fortunately, we have what we need to make that happen.” She taps the yellowing papers in her lap, covered in maps and scribbled numbers. “Data.” With a confident smirk, she pulls her tricorder off her belt, its corner dented and display scratched from the fall. “All we need to do is analyze it.”

***

Chakotay stares out at the subterranean sea, the orange glow of the giant caver bathing it eternally in the colors of an Earth sunset. Bending down, he tests the water’s cleanliness with a tricorder before scooping it into the group’s water bottles. Smiling despite himself, he spares the unbelievable vista one last look before turning to head back to the alien treehouse. He might not be thrilled to be here to the degree that Tom and Kathryn seem to be, but the unknown alien’s notes were right about the existence of the underground ocean--and not only does that give him hope that the data Kathryn is using to plot their escape remains accurate, the ocean is stunningly strange and eerily beautiful.

He thinks of Captain Kirk’s famous credo. _To ‘go where no one has gone before,’ indeed._

Making his way back to the tree shelter, he hands the water around and leans against the wall, watching Kathryn work.

“If we fit the data we have to the established hyperbolic equation…” She plugs some more numbers into the tricorder, then looks up, her eyes serious. “The temperature will max out in fifty-six hours, and reach seventy centigrade only ten hours before that.”

“Two days,” murmurs Tom.

“If the temperature really hits a hundred,” Harry puts in, cutting through the gravity of the moment, “how are all those little animals we saw running around still alive?”

Janeway shrugs slightly. “I’m not quite sure. I do know that smaller species are sometimes more capable of regulating their blood temperatures to survive extreme conditions, depending on their physiology. If that’s what’s happening here, the smaller animals must be able to survive the extreme heat. But anything much bigger than a dog won’t be able to regulate their body temperature that way, so I have to assume the megafauna in Tom’s friend’s book is an embellishment for dramatic effect. Nothing that large would be able to survive down here, year after year.” Her voice changes, excitement fading until only gravity reminds. “That includes us. We _need_ to get to the surface, and we need to do it in under two days’ time.”

“According to the notes, we should be able to float to the surface on a geyser-like river at the other side of the sea,” Harry tells Chakotay.

“We don’t exactly have time to hike around the ocean’s perimeter,” Janeway says, then turns to Tom with a grin. “Tom, you enjoy sailing, don’t you?”

***

Kathryn sits on a log at the edge of the water, taking a long drink of water as she watches the other members of the away team tie rushes together and haul logs. They are already over halfway finished with the construction of the boat. Now, despite the fact that she was the one to implement mandatory rest breaks as the temperature climbed above thirty-five degrees, as the clock runs down and the temperature rises Kathryn wishes she was doing anything other than sitting here, watching the other members of the away team and forcing herself not to think about whether or not they will all survive.

_Focus, Kathryn. Clear those thoughts from your mind. This is a fascinating adventure; you said so yourself when you first landed in that impossible forest. Think about that._

Not now, it isn’t. Not now that they’re on the clock. Not now that--despite the optimism that Kathryn has been trying to project for the sake of her crew--she doesn’t even know if the supposed geyser will take them topside unscathed.

Not now that she might have to watch Tom or Chakotay or Harry die just trying to reach the bottom of that questionable ride home.

Part of her can still feel the numb, shocked despair that settled onto her shoulders only a few weeks ago, sitting in her ready room as Chakotay brought in the news of the alien vessel that had heard B’Elanna’s distress call.

 

_“They couldn't get a fix on her position. That was ten days ago.”_

_"_ _B'Elanna ordered Harry into an escape pod. What's the longest he could survive?”_

_She knew the answer. She needed to hear him say it. She needed him to somehow, somehow tell her that the impossible was true._

_But he is Chakotay, her first officer, Harry’s mentor and friend, and in the face of only one true outcome, of course he didn’t. Couldn’t. Can’t._

_“Less than ten days.”_

 

Kathryn scrubs her face with her hands, dragging herself back to the present. Back to the sweat dripping down her arms, and the smell of sulfur in the air. Back to the voices of her crew, working on the boat that _will_ carry them out of here.

For the last few weeks since Harry and B’Elanna were recovered from that L-class planet, she has had nightmares, more frequent than usual, about the loss of her crew. Sometimes it’s Harry, sometimes someone else, sometimes no specific crewmember but only the vague sense of guilt and dread as she paces Voyager’s deserted halls in her dreams, knowing that she has failed her crew and that because of that she has lost all of them.

And now...here...

She scrubs at her face again, refusing to acknowledge the other memories dogging her, memories from another ship, another time, another quadrant.

Another volcanically active moon. Another survey mission.

_Don’t be a cliche, Kathryn, haunted forever by one failure. Just because something terrible happened to your team on a survey mission a lifetime ago doesn’t mean this team won’t make it out of this one._

But no matter what she tells herself, Kathryn knows that she will never truly forget the faces of the people she sent to that moon as a young commander on the Billings, or what happened to them there.

She lets out a long, deep breath, watching Chakotay, Tom and Harry as they work, silhouetted by the subterranean sea. _They are not them. This is not then. We’re going to make it out of this._

_All of us._

***

The boat’s sail, crafted from the treehouse’s hammock and the away team’s useless uniform jackets, unfurls into the hot air of the cavern as Chakotay and Tom let it out. The boat jerks forward, and Janeway and Harry splash through the shallow water, jumping onto the rapidly-departing craft.

“We’re off!” Chakotay says, with one of his rare bright, completely unguarded grins.

Tom takes the pack from Harry, pulling it onto his shoulders. “With a little thanks to our anonymous friend,” he says, smiling back.

“I have to hand it to you, Tom,” Janeway says. “This is certainly an adventure for the books.”

Tom and Harry groan at the terrible pun, while Chakotay chuckles unironically.

“Well, adventure or not,” Tom says proudly, “we’re going to make it to our geyser ticket out of here in record time. If we continue at this speed, we’ll be up and out before the temp hits forty.”

“Nice work, everyone,” Chakotay says, smiling.

“Yes,” Janeway echoes, and Tom notices how tired she looks as she stares watchfully off into the sunset-colored waters ahead of them. “Well done.”


	3. In Which Our Heroes Split Up (Not Exactly On Purpose)

The subterranean sea glows in shades of gold and ochre, the waters sparkling with the reflection of the orange haze above them that obscures the cavern’s distant ceiling. Staring at the landscape around them, Harry finds himself thinking back over other strange adventure he has shared with the other members of this away team. He nudges Tom, who is sitting beside him at the rear of the boat as Janeway and Chakotay take their shift at the sail.

“Think this is our weirdest away mission?”

Tom laughs. “In the Delta Quadrant? Not even close.”

“Oh? You think this isn’t as weird as the time Voyager got twisted into a pretzel by an unusually chatty space cloud?”

“ _That’s_ the weirdest Delta Quadrant exploit you can think of? How about the time we all got brainwashed by the Hirogen into refighting World War II, and you had to save all our butts singlehandedly?”

Harry grins. “That had nothing on the time photosensitive aliens tried to take over the ship by replacing us one by one.”

“You think _that_ tips the weirdness scales? What about--”

“Is it just me,” Chakotay interrupts loudly, “or is the ‘sky’ getting darker?”

Harry opens his mouth to tell Chakotay how unlikely it is that the light in the underground cavern is changing, then closes it. Not only does the orange haze above them seem to be darkening, the air around them feels like it does on Earth when the barometric drops before…

“A storm?” he says aloud.

Janeway looks grim. “We’re about halfway across. If we can just make it another half hour--”

Fat raindrops begin to descend, the boat smacking up and down on the water as higher waves rock it back and forth.

“Should we pull in the sail?” Chakotay asks.

There is silence for a moment, the group looking at each other, up at the sky, and back to the boat again. “No,” says Janeway finally. “We can’t afford to lose the time being pulled off course by the current. Just let it go a little more slack--”

Harry jumps to Chakotay’s side, helping him yank at the makeshift ropes as the subterranean wind picks up speed and rain begins to pelt them harder. The sky and sea are all dark now, the boat slamming up and down more dramatically as water sprays across it with each new wave.

“How the hell can there be a storm underground? This makes no goddam scientific sense!” Tom howls.

“Forget the storm,” Chakotay yells back. “Look!”

Small shapes are speeding through them through the roiling water. As they grow closer, Harry can see the glimmer of teeth as the…the _what?_...open and close their jaws.

“Are those…” he asks hesitantly, pitching his voice above the nose of the storm.

“Alien piranhas?” Chakotay asks grimly. “ _They’d better not be._ ”

As the shoal reaches them, one of the shapes detaches from the water, sailing into the air and towards the faces of the humans in the boat.

“Holyfuckingshit!” Tom yelps, dodging the piranha’s jaws as it arcs back into the water with a splash.

As the first piranha descends, two move leap towards the boat. Harry yanks Chakotay out of one of their paths as Tom grabs a piece of wood, using it to whack the piranha out of the air.

“Nice hit, Tom!”

Still hanging onto the rope, Janeway turns to call, “We need to take this sail down!”

Chakotay moves back to her side, and Harry grabs another piece of wood, crossing to stand next to Tom.

“Hello?”

The voice is so quiet compared with the storm around them that Harry barely hears it at first, but then it comes again.

“Hello-oo?”

“Tom?” Harry yells, whacking another piranha away from the command team. “Uh, your combadge?”

“My what?”

_“Your combadge!”_

Tom reaches down, tapping the badge. “Uh, Tom here?” he shouts over the noise of the storm.

“Where are you?”

“Who _is_ this?”

“Mezoti. You started talking out of one of Seven’s sensors but she’s not here. Everyone is on the bridge looking for you. Are you okay?” Mezoti asks, sounding scared.

“We’re gonna be fine, Mezoti!” Tom yells, swinging the stick again and connecting with a piranha with a loud _thwack!_ “We’re--we’re playing baseball!”

“Mezoti, we need to talk to a grown-up! Can you get one?” Janeway hollars, hanging onto the rope.

“Uh-huh, I’m going to--” The sound of Mezoti’s voice abruptly cuts out.

“Must have lost signal!” Janeway yells. “Incredible that the signal carried down here, even for a minute!”

Tom taps his combadge again and then gives it up, whacking two piranhas in quick succession as Janeway and Chakotay finally get the sail down. “Hey, at least we didn’t scare her too much! _And_ now Voyager knows we’re alive!”

Harry bats a piranha away from Chakotay’s head. “It’s the little things, Tom! It’s the little things!”

***

Chakotay isn’t sure how long it has been--perhaps ten minutes, perhaps an hour--when the waters finally begin to calm slightly. His cautious relief over the receding storm is tempered, however, by the continued presence of the piranhas, who circle the ragged boat, leaping occasionally at its crew.

“I don’t suppose there was anything in your book about how to get incredibly aggressive alien piranhas to buzz off, was there, Tom?”

Tom whacks a piranha absentmindedly. “No mention of it!”

“Well, at least we didn’t get too turned around in all that wind,” Kathryn says, tucking a grimy strand of hair behind her ear. “We just didn’t get closer to the farther shore, either. Hang on to your piranha bats, gentlemen; if the wind doesn’t start taking us in the right direction again, we might have to row.”

“No chance of me letting go of this,” Harry says with a wry laugh, keeping a wary eye on the shoal.

Chakotay squints into the water. “Actually...are they dissipating?”

All four members of the away team peer down into the water. Staring intently into the waves right in front of the boat, Chakotay nearly jumps out of his skin when Kathryn yells, “Eleven o’clock!”

Looking up and to the left, he sees it: a dark form swimming toward them through the water.

“Maybe it’s a riptide?” Harry offers hopefully.

Tom shakes his head. “I don’t think so,” he says softly.

Within seconds, the shoal of piranhas has dispersed. As it makes its way toward the boat, the dark shape ripples upward, finally cresting to raise its reptilian head above the water.

The sea creature’s head alone is as wide as a small horse, its long neck the thickness of a pine tree. As it crests and dives down again, its body seems to stretch on infinitely, finally disappearing into the water with a flick of its tail as two more sea serpents suddenly surface beside it, their roars filling the air more loudly than the sound of the receding storm.

“WHAT HAPPENED TO NO ANIMALS BIGGER THAN A DOG?!” Tom screams.

“They must be able to dive deeper into the water, where the depths stays cool! Or, well, less hot!”

“Never mind the science!” Chakotay yells in Kathryn and Tom’s general direction. “Hang on! We _don’t know where that thing is going to surface!”_

Everyone grips the boat or its mast tightly for several tense seconds. Chakotay’s warning proves to be more than well-founded when two of the monsters crest simultaneously, the water beneath them sending the small boat tilting onto its side. Chakotay rubs his eyes, gasping, as the ship rights itself again--minus two passengers.

“Harry?!” Chakotay stares around wildly into the water. _“Kathryn?!”_

“Chakotay! I’m fine! I’m--”

Pivoting, Chakotay stares, heart in his throat, as Kathryn waves at him from ten meters away, treading water. No. Not treading water--

“Is she standing on that thing’s back?” Tom asks in a horrified whisper as Kathryn, submersed from the waist down, wobbles and regains her balance.

“Tom!”

Harry is treading water--for real, Chakotay is relieved to note, and free of any serpentine assistance--a dozen meters to Kathryn’s right. As Tom yells his name, a wave hits him in the face and he sinks beneath the water before surfacing, coughing, only for another wave to momentarily pull him under.

Just as Chakotay is formulating a plan to retrieve Harry, the serpent providing Kathryn with an unsuspecting platform dives deep beneath the water, pulling her with it.

For a frozen moment, Kathryn and the serpent disappear beneath the surface. Then, all at once, the monster crests, leaping from the water with Kathryn clinging to its neck.

“AAAAAYYYYEEEEEHAWWWWW!” she yells, laughing. “Hang on, Harry!”

As the serpent dives again, Kathryn grabs Harry’s hand, pulling him onto her the creature’s back with her. The serpent dives and surfaces, cutting through the water more rapidly than the boat could ever hope to sail, growing farther and farther away.

“HARRY! KATHRYN!”

Tom grabs Chakotay’s shoulder. “That thing isn’t going to hurt them! Something as small as a human doesn’t even seem to register in its senses!”

Chakotay shakes off his hand. “KATHRYN!”

“Chakotay! They’re fine! Look!”

Sure enough, Chakotay can faintly see Kathryn and Harry still clinging to the sea monster’s back, together.

He lets out a long, shaky breath. “Maybe that...creature...will get them close enough to the shore of this ocean that they can swim the rest of the way.”

Tom nods firmly. “If anyone can not just survive but triumph during a cruise on a sea monster, it’s Harry and the Captain. We just need to keep going on our own conveyance so we can meet them at the geyser. Or, if need be, find them and help them get there.” He glances down at the ankle-deep water at their feet. “We should probably start by bailing out the boat.”


	4. In Which Our Heroes Journey Onwards (Not Without Calamity)

 Wiping sweat from his forehead, Harry pulls the dented tricorder from his belt. “It’s forty-two degrees.”

Kathryn nods in acknowledgement. The air around them feels like wet porridge, as though they are swimming through fog. “We’re just under a kilometer from the geyser. If we walks slowly and steadily, we’ll make it there, rendezvous with the team, and be out of here in no time.”

She tries to keep her voice even, but her exhaustion feels so thick that she can no longer chase away the clinging fear. This is not the worst scrape she’s been in, right? Not by half. But she’s here, _running out of time, with Harry, Harry, Harry…_

Shaking her head to clear it, she starts walking, setting a slow but steady pace around the shore of the underground sea.

The air grows even more humid as they slip between a growing number of towering plants, the bright green reminding Kathryn of the tropical jungle back home on Earth. She tries to look at what is around them with an explorer’s eye, noticing the small creatures that scamper from the shelter of one spikey shrub to another, and spongey texture of the dark soil, much like the soft ground of the mushroom forest.

Finally, the tricorder informs them that they are half a kilometer from the meeting coordinates. “Let’s take a rest,” she says, lowering herself onto a rock.

Harry unscrews the top of the water bottle, closing his eyes as he drinks, and Kathryn opens her own, wincing only slightly at the mineral taste of the water.

They rest in silence for a few minutes. Finally, Kathryn levers herself to her feet. “Ready?”

“Ready for anything, Captain,” Harry says with wry humor, forcing a confident smile through his exhaustion.

“Good show, Ensign,” she responds with a chuckle.

“I don’t suppose this little adventure will pop me over the edge to Lieutenant, huh?” Harry adds, replacing his water bottle.

Kathryn winces internally. Harry’s “jokes” about promotion have become more frequent--that is to say, more frequent than none at all--over the past year, despite their meeting about her reasons for not giving him the new title he’s been angling for. While she can understand the motivation behind his pointed jokes--they clearly serve as a release valve for the frustration he undoubtedly feels--she never knows how to respond to the jokes other than to skate past them smoothly.

“Let’s focus on survival first, Mr. Kim, and hierarchy later.”

Stepping forward towards the meeting coordinates, it takes several steps before Kathryn realizes that not only has Harry not replied to her rejoinder--smoothly, awkwardly, or otherwise--she can’t hear his footsteps behind her at all.

Wheeling around, Kathryn stares into the jungle around her. “Harry?” Nothing moves except one small subterranean mouse skittering along the ground. “Harry!”

Taking several steps toward the log where Harry sat, she sees his water bottle on the ground. Eyes searching desperately, she turns to left and right before her glance flickers up.

Harry is struggling in the tight grip of a neon-green plant that can only be described as a Venus fly-trap three times as tall as Kathryn is. The plant’s closed leaves are as wide as a lounge chair, and the guard hairs lining them are as long as Harry’s hand, which he is waving desperately as he kicks and thrashes in the improbable trap.

“Harry! Keep fighting!” Kathryn dives against the plant’s thick stem, cursing the loss of her phaser and utility knife in the subterranean sea. Grabbing a rock from the ground, she pounds it against the stem until green ooze coats her hand and the whole plant shudders, loosening its grip enough that Harry can finish kicking his way out.

He plummets from the mouth of the plant to the muddy ground, and Kathryn runs to him. His eyes are glazed with pain and shock, the skin of his cheek burned by the enzymes in the plant’s leaves.

“It--they--” he mutters wildly, looking around frantically.

She gets in his line of vision, voice steady and soothing. “It’s all right, Harry. You’re free. You’re going to be just fine.”

His eyes clear somewhat, and with a pang, she remembers standing over him in sickbay after another kind biological attack rendered him in injured and in pain, fighting against Species 8472’s venom all those years ago. From the confused, desperate look in his eyes, she wonders if he too has been propelled by this ordeal into an earlier time. “It’s all okay,” she repeats. “We’re on an alien moon, just a few minutes away from our meeting point. We’ll see Tom and Chakotay soon, and then we’ll all make it back to Voyager, safe and well. It’s all okay.”

Taking a long, shaky breath, Harry reaches for her, his right hand brushing against her shoulder, just like she has reached out in the past to give his shoulder a light squeeze. She knows better than to touch someone who is panicked or in shock without invitation, but the brush of Harry’s hand feels like invitation enough, and her eyes are blurring with tears, all the worry of the last day and half coming to rest on her shoulders now that Harry is safe. She pulls him into her arms, rocking him the way she would her younger sister, Phoebe, if she were here and in distress. Normally she does not cross this boundary with her crew; normally she does not act like they are her family in the most literal, familiar sense of the word. But Harry is still shaking, and Kathryn is tired and drained and aching and exhausted and filthy from head to toe, and right now all she wants to do is hold him.

***

“Figures that _we_ kept the boat and yet _we_ were the ones to get blown off course,” Tom mutters, stifling a yawn as he makes his way toward the inviting fissure in the boulders ahead of them.

“We just need to keep heading northwest,” Chakotay mutters grimly, not even a little of the tension in his voice draining away at Tom’s half-joking complaint.

As Tom slips through the crack in the cliff, he sighs. He can understand being worried about Harry and the captain, but Chakotay has been acting like every light-hearted comment Tom makes is a knife in the back of their absent friends.

Turning, he calls to Chakotay, “Looks safe. Come on through.”

As the two officers make their way through the rocky landscape, the eery orange glow from above seems to grow stronger and more red. Tom can feel the hairs on his arms standing on end, and he rubs at the hair on his head absentmindedly, feeling the thick resistance of static electricity.

He is just about to ask Chakotay if he can feel it too when they turn the corner, and a stunning view opens up before them.

“Dang,” Tom mutters softly.

Stretching out in front of them is what can only be described as a natural bridge over a deep chasm. For all appearances floating in midair, two dozen flat dark rocks hover between the two sides of the gap.

“Magnetism,” Chakotay murmurs.

The two stare in awe for another moment before Tom makes to step onto the first stone. “Well, a bridge is a bridge, isn’t--”

“Don’t walk on them, you idiot!” Chakotay groans. “They’re floating right at that level, right? So all you need to do is hold on to one of them and push yourself across!”

“Oh.” Tom bends down, sitting on one of the stones, which sinks only a few centimeters lower under his weight. Pushing off lightly from the edge, he begins to drifty slowly towards the opposite side of the chasm. “Right.”

Carefully, Chakotay lowers himself onto another of the magnetic stones, pushing himself across after Tom. As Tom scrambles onto the far edge of the chasm, he turns back, offering a hand to Chakotay, but Chakotay either doesn’t see it or acts as though he doesn’t, clambering onto the surface a few feet to Tom’s left.

Tom sighs again, quietly, wiping sweat from his face with a grubby palm. Chakotay calling him an idiot almost gave him hope that the older man was cheering up--the insult was in a fairly joking tone, and Tom has the overall sense that an straight-up insult from Chakotay is always going to be said either partially in jest, or in seriousness only in a conflict far worse than whatever Chakotay is feeling now--but the man’s enduring grimness gives lie to that hopeful prognosis.

As Tom pulls his water bottle out of his backpack, silently handing Chakotay’s over to him, he watches him out of the corner of his eye. Chakotay’s sweat-soaked face is tense and grave, and his eyes look hollow.

He must really be worried. Closing the water bottle, Tom stares back into the ravine for a moment, trying to put himself in the other person’s shoes, as he has learned to do when he argues with B’Elanna.

 _B’Elanna._ Tom’s partner. The best part of Tom’s life. Tom cares deeply for Janeway and Harry, the danger they may be in dogging at his mind like an aching bruise, but at least B’Elanna--the closest thing Tom has to family in the Delta Quadrant--is safe aboard Voyager. But for Chakotay…

Chakotay’s closest friend in the galaxy, along with the young man he has mentored for six years, are somewhere in this nightmarish cavern, and there is little he can do to even find them, much less help them.

Tom can understand why he is tense, carrying that kind of weight.

“Hey,” he says gently. “They’re going to be just fine. They’re tougher than you and me put together. Both of them.”

Chakotay glances at Tom, looking surprised. Tom offers him a lopsided smile. He can’t blame Chakotay for being a bit nonplussed; he and the commander don’t exactly talk about feelings often.

“Yes,” Chakotay says finally, his tense expression looking a little less grim. “They will.”

“In fact,” Tom points out, voice calm but firm, “they care so much about us that if we want to do what’s best for them, we need to do what they’d most want, which is stay safe and get ourselves to the rendezvous point. They can undoubtedly handle the rest.”

Letting out a deep breath, he grabs the pack again, and the two of them get to their feet, stepping forward towards the mouth of the subcavern.

As they walk towards the softer, more yellow light from outside, Chakotay gives Tom a gentle slap on the back. “When did you get so philosophical?”

Tom shrugs, smiling slightly. “Somewhere between the Ocampa homeworld and the center of this moon?”

Chakotay chuckles gently, and the two of them step through the subcavern mouth and forward into the rolling sand dunes ahead of them.


	5. In Which Our Heroes Rise (Not Just Metaphorically)

“What’s that noise?” Kathryn asks, peering around warily.

Harry, hiking a few steps ahead of her, points ahead of them. “I think we’ll find out in a minute.”

Despite both of their somewhat improved emotional states, Kathryn can hear how rough both of their voices sound, drained by heat and exhaustion. She is just reaching for the tricorder to check their coordinates when Harry parts a tangle of vines, revealing an opening into a dark natural tunnel in the side of the looming cavern wall.

“It’s--” He looks back at her, laughing with relief. “The water. The river. We made it to the river.”

“Oh,” she says, feeling relief flow through her numb body. “Oh. Good. We did it.”

“We did.”

“Now…” With shaking fingers, Kathryn pulls out the dented tricorder, scanning for human lifesigns. “No sign of Tom and Chakotay.” She swallows. “They’re probably fine, just taking a little longer to make it here. They’re the ones who kept our ride, after all,” she adds, forcing a chuckle.

“Yeah,” says Harry, dropping to sit on the soft ground just outside the opening. “It’s only been two hours since we were separated. We must have lucked out and had those serpents take us the direct route.”

Kathryn laughs again, settling to the ground next to him.

“Water?”

Harry takes the bottle eagerly. “Now we can fill up easily if we run out.”

“If it takes the others more than a few more minutes to get here, that’s not an _if_ but a _when._ I think I’ve sweated a full bottle of water in the last five minutes.”

Harry laughs, then closes his eyes for a moment. Kathryn rubs a hand through her tangled hair, letting her tense, aching muscles relax.

They did it. They’re here.

For a few minutes, they sit in peaceful silence.

“Captain?”

“What is it?” Harry’s voice is hesitant, and Kathryn frowns in concern.

“I...wanted to apologize, I guess. I know it’s pretty silly as far as last regrets go, but when I was trapped by that plant...well, I was kicking myself, for a fraction of a second there, that a stupid joke about a promotion was the last thing I’d said to you. I...am not sure I agree with the reasons you’ve given me for not promoting me,” he adds simply. “I don’t think I can say that I can understand that. But I do regret...carrying that frustration into our day-to-day relationship in a way that wasn’t...well...wasn’t really doing anything to help either of us.”

“Don’t worry about the jokes, Harry,” Kathryn says quietly. “If you’re stuck in a difficult situation of any kind...well, humor can help. It can be a way to blow off some warp plasma at those times when you’ve already tried to make an actual change and it hasn’t worked. But you know that. The point is, I understand,”

Harry looks relieved, though not as relieved as he might have been at her approval six years ago--just as, six years ago, she doubts that he would have asserted his opinion about his lack of promotion so clearly and simply in the same breath as his genuine apology.

He has changed. He has grown.

And having that illustrated so clearly, for the hundredth time, right in front of her face, is the final push Kathryn needs to know what she needs, finally, to say.

“The thing is, Harry,” she tells him softly, “the reasons I gave you, when I met with you about why I wasn’t promoting you...not only were they not good, they were not true.”

Harry looks startled, blinking at her in surprise.

“I know what I said in my ready room, last time we talked. I think, at the time, I even believed it. But...if I were promoting you on the merits, you would have made lieutenant years ago, in any quadrant.” She lets out a long breath. “You’re still an ensign because of me. Me, personally, and the fears I couldn’t let go. It wasn’t anything about you, and it wasn’t anything you needed to get better at or anything you could have fixed.”

He sighs softly. “I thought...if I impressed you…”

She closes her eyes, shaking her head. “It was never about impressing me or fulfilling your duties as an officer. It should have been, but it wasn’t. It was about me trying to...to protect you, somehow, not that that even ever really worked. It was about me trying, just trying to keep you in a position where there’d be a little less danger, a little less responsibility. Not because of you. Because of me.”

She opens her eyes to see Harry staring off into the distance, as though he is processing her words. Finally, he smiles, a sad, lopsided smile. “I understand.”

“You don’t have to understand,” she tells him, tears springing to her eyes. “It’s not right, what I did.”

“But it is understandable. We all do things that aren’t entirely right, some of the time. And--” He sighs. “I am...angry...I guess, in a way, and I wish you hadn’t done what you did, but...it makes sense. We all have...things we’re afraid of. Things that must not happen, no matter what. And we all do...stuff we’re not proud of, some of the time. Doing something like this...it doesn’t mean you’re a bad captain. Or a bad person. It just means you’re human.”

She smiles, squeezing his hand gently. “There was a time when I thought that captains had to be more than human.” A long sigh. “I’m glad that captaining Voyager has made me aware of just how untrue that is. For better and for worse. I’m just sorry that, for the last few years, you’ve had to pay the price for this little part of my humanity.”

They sit in silence for a moment, and then Harry reaches out, wrapping his arm gently around Kathryn’s shoulders. Once again, they lean against each other, sitting together in the quiet of the subterranean world. Kathryn closes her eyes, feeling the rise and fall of Harry’s chest through her uniform jacket. He is alive. He is alive, and they are here together, a captain and her crewmember who is something closer to family. She is here with him, here with him after danger that came for him and may well come again, and as she sits leaning against Harry’s side, she can feel herself finally letting herself acknowledge her terrible fear, all the guilt and pain and despair she has been carrying in her nightmares feeling a little lighter now, somehow.

She knows that it will never be easy to send her crew into danger. She’s human, after all, and she cares.

But her crew is smart, and capable, and when they go into danger, it’s because it’s a danger they signed up for.

And as Captain, it’s her job not just to minimize the danger, but recognize their courage and capability in facing it.

“Do you hear that?” Harry says after a few more minutes have slipped by, straightening up. Kathryn raises her head, getting to her feet and stepping forward to peer into the tunnel housing the underground river.

Somewhere to the left of their position, she can hear voices.

***

The subterranean light is brighter here, almost as if Tom and Chakotay are walking through a desert on a planet’s surface. Tom points. “We just need to keep walking in the same direction and, according to the map, we should reach the geyser coordinates in less than ten minutes’ walk.”

“And you’re sure we’re not just lost?” Chakotay asks. “It doesn’t really look like there are any cavern walls, much less rivers, in that direction.”

“Well, without a tricorder…” Tom sighs, wiping his forehead. “Wouldn’t you think Starfleet would, I don’t know, sew some kind of ultra-high-tech compass into the lining of our uniforms or something?”

“You ditched your uniform jacket,” Chakotay points out, with one of his characteristic darkly amused grins. “And the magnetism down here would screw up a compass, anyway.”

“So we could just follow it in the opposite direction! Besides--”

 _“Tom.”_ Chakotay’s tone of voice is the same as Janeway’s back when she told him to freeze on top of the muscovite. Tom freezes instinctively, then looks in the direction that Chakotay is pointing.

“Is that,” Chakotay says cautiously, “a bone?”

“It’s a very…” Tom walks cautiously toward the bleached white curve. “ _Long_ bone.”

“And that...that’s not a pile of sticks at all on the top of that dune, is it?”

“No,” Tom says, swallowing. “I would say that the giant sharp-toothed dinosaur-looking skull means that it is not.”

As the two men stare at the enormous skeleton on top of the dune, a roar splits the air behind them.

Tom can feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand up as, slowly, he turns.

The creature roaring at them can only be described as a close analogue to an Earth tyrannosaurus rex, although it appears to be reptilian rather than feathered. As Chakotay drags Tom behind a nearby boulder by the arm, Tom feels as though he is already frozen in the dinosaur’s sights as the enormous creature stalks slowly closer.

“What do we do? What do we do?” Tom whispers furiously, peeking out above the top of the rock.

“Well, a giant carnivorous animal is after us; so I’d say we _probably hide!”_

“You’re supposed to know about this stuff! You’re an archeologist!”

“ _Archaeologist_ , not _paleontologist!_ _”_ Chakotay hisses.

Twenty meters ahead of them, the dinosaur stares back and forth, sweeping the desert in front of it with its eyes as it searches for its prey. Slowly, it takes another step forward, then another. Tom can feel each footfall reverberate toward them across the sand.

Then, all at once, another sound drifts across the subterranean desert. The noise is remarkably similar to the roar made by the creature in front of them mere moments ago, but it is fainter, and repeated several times, almost like…

The dinosaur whips its head in the direction of the sound, listening intently.

“It’s calling to it!” Chakotay whispers. “That must be a communication call!”

Sure enough, Tom can see the faint shape, no bigger than his pinkie nail, of what might just be another t-rex close to the desert horizon.

Without further ado, the dinosaur formerly stalking Chakotay and Tom lopes off across the sand in the direction of its associate.

“Well, that was a close one,” Chakotay mutters. “We might still be lost as far as our path out of here goes, but at least we haven’t been eaten.”

Tom groans in relief, wiping his forehead with his hand. Something about what Chakotay says is bothering him, though. _Communication call. Path out of here..._

“Wait a second.” Tom straightens up, wide-eyed. “The captain said that no animal larger than a dog could survive when the cavern heats up! But there’s no way these things are, are just going extinct every five years and re-spawning or something! So…”

“So they must have a way to escape to the surface!” Chakotay explains. “Or to somewhere cooler than this carvern going to get, anyway.” He stares wildly into the subterranean desert, where the dinosaurs are vanishing into a haze of distance. “Which means we shouldn’t be running from these things--”

Tom completes his sentence, already scrambling to his fee. “We should be following them!”

***

Harry prods the pile of bones just inside of the tunnel’s opening. “You really think a dinosaur skull is going to be seaworthy?”

“River-worthy, to be precise. And I’d rather take my chances with the specific density of bone--which is lighter than saltwater, depending on the animal--than stumble my way through the mud on the side of this river.”

“How do you even know this stuff? I thought your specialty was physics, not paleontology.”

“Six years with Commander Chakotay will certainly do the trick,” Janeway says, removing her hand from the skull and stepping back smartly to stare at it, hands on her hips.

“As he’s reminded me in the past, he’s an archeologist, not a paleontologist.”

“Oh, don’t listen to him,” Janeway says with a wink. “He’s fascinated by anything and anyone from the past, whether it’s what he went to the Academy for or not.”

Harry steps forward gingerly into the mud, which squelches under his feet and pulls unmercifully at his boots, and shrugs, conceding the point. “All right. Let’s get this thing in the water.”

As the unconventional craft pushes off from the river shore, Janeway sticks her makeshift bone oar into the water, using it to steer the weathered skull left along the gentle current toward the sound of the voices.

Harry shakes his head. _This is one hell of an away mission._

As they get closer, the voices become clearer.

“What we need is a, a flat piece of wood, something we can row like a raft. Or better yet, something we can use as a boat,” Chakotay is saying.

“And just where are we going to find a boat?” Tom grumbles.

“How’s this?” Janeway calls, the echo of her voice bouncing around the walls of the tunnel.

Harry doesn’t think he’ll ever forget the look on any of his crewmembers’ faces as Chakotay and Tom bound forward into the water, Janeway’s face breaking into a joyful grin as Chakotay laughs with relief and Tom chokes up. Tom hops into the skull, pulling first Harry and then Janeway into his arms.

“You all right, Harry?” Chakotay asks, grasping him affectionately by the shoulders as he inspects Harry’s burned cheek.

“Just your typical run-in with some alien megaflora.”

Still grinning, Chakotay pulls Harry in for a quick hug, then lets go of him to reach for Janeway, pulling her gently to his chest. She smiles, closing her eyes as she wraps her arms around him, squeezing him tightly.

“All right,” she says, pulling back from the hug, her eyes sparkling. “Time to find our geyser?”

“Actually,” Tom says, “maybe not.”

***

Chakotay is the one who ends up holding the dented tricorder as the group floats lazily along the underground river, relating to each other the events each half of the away team faced.

“And then we realized that some multi-ton reptiles were hardly going to hop in a geyser every five years and let it spit them hellishly onto the moon’s surface,” Tom finishes, “so there had to be another, more passive way out.” He waves a hand around them.

“I take it your tour guides have stomped down this river ahead of us, then?” Kathryn asks, quirking an eyebrow.

“Presumably.” Chakotay smiles. “And they did indeed know what they were doing.” He turns the tricorder display so that everyone can read it. “Temperature just went down a tenth of a degree.”

Tom pumps the air, Harry grins, and Kathryn laughs with relief.

“Up and out, indeed, hmm?”

Chakotay smiles back at her. “Indeed.”

As daylight slowly creeps over the river, the away team takes turns resting, though even the person on steering duty is only occasionally dipping the bone oar into the river to keep the boat heading steadily down the center of the current. Lying back, Chakotay stares as the luminescent birds that inhabit the top of the river tunnel, twittering gently as they dive and call to each other.

“Is it just me, or do those birds look _exactly_ like Earth sparrows that are glowing in the middle?” Tom mutters.

Kathryn just smiles. “Infinite diversity in infinite combinations, Tom.”

The daylight gradually increases until finally the bright circle of the tunnel’s surface exit comes into view. Holding the oar for the last, triumphant leg of their journey, Chakotay finds himself grinning so hard his face hurts as the boat coasts into the cool dry air of the outside world.

They are surrounded by scrubby grasslands, a landscape much different from the mountainous terrain of the initial survey mission. As the four of them step one by one out of the skull boat onto the silty bank of the river, Kathryn makes a gesture for them to be silent, tilting her head to the side and listening.

“Shhh. Hear that?”

In the distance, there is the familiar sound of dinosaurs calling. But there’s more than one voice--more, even, than two voices--now.

“Sounds like a couple of stragglers met up with their crew,” Tom says, grinning broadly.

Kathryn reaches for the dented tricorder, beginning to signal Voyager’s frequencies. “And it’s time for us to do the same.”

***

Five days later, the mess hall is crowded with crewmembers in their dress uniforms. Harry stands at the bow end of the hall, shoulders back and chin lifted, as Janeway finishes her speech.

“We have all had the honor of working with Harry Kim in both good times and in crises, on Voyager’s bridge and in her Jeffries tubes, and we have all seen how he conducts himself, at all times, as an exemplary Starfleet officer. Ensign Kim, it is now my honor to grant you the rank of Lieutenant.” As Janeway pins the second pip to his collar, beaming widely, she adds in her normal tone of voice, “Congratulations, Harry.”

The rest of the ceremony and its brief reception goes by as though Harry is walking on air. It seems like half the ship has turned out to celebrate Harry’s big day, and Neelix is in his element, serving dishes from cultures across the quadrant. Harry accepts well-wishes from dozens of colleagues, briefly talks shop with B’Elanna about Voyager’s upcoming dilithium mining operation on the moon’s surface--not all the dilithium is as easy to extract as the extraordinary crystals in the destroyed cave would have been--and chats with Naomi, Azan, Rebi and Mezoti, who demand to hear all the details of the shiny new responsibilities and privileges his new rank entails.

He is just stepping out into the hall, grinning ear to ear after Chakotay’s hearty handshake and warm congratulations, when he hears the sound of arguing coming from a few paces to his left.

Tom and Janeway are standing at the edge of the hallway a few meters from the mess hall door, locked in a fierce discussion. Harry can’t see Tom’s face, but he can certainly recognize the captain’s trademark glare--although he can’t help but wonder if he sees a twinkle in her eyes, too.

“Well, after we plummeted into the mushroom forest, most of the broken-up cave floor came with us, and there were quite a few dilithium crystals lying around. All I did was pick them up,” Tom is saying.

“And you were lugging the extra weight of that dilithium around the whole time?”

“Extra weight? It was no more than a few kilograms--”

“It was absolutely unessential!”

“Unessential? It’s going to save Voyager a massive mining effort we could barely have afforded to expend while guaranteeing we’ll have ample power for the next thousand lightyears! It was for the good of the ship!”

“And what about the good of following orders, hmm?”

“You didn’t order me not to bring the dilithium to the surface!”

“That’s because it didn’t even occur to me that you would! Thomas Eugene Paris, this has got to be one of the most irresponsible decisions you’ve ever--”

“Captain, you would have done the exact same thing and you know it--”

“Don’t even think about implying that I would have disobeyed the implied standing orders of my commanding officer to--”

Grinning to himself, Harry lets the sound of Tom and Janeway’s argument fade away as he strides down the hall towards the turbolift. He only has about twenty minutes to change from his dress uniform into his regular black and gold--albeit with a very significant addition to his undershirt collar--and Voyager’s newest lieutenant isn’t about to arrive for gamma shift late.


End file.
